High quality medical sensing and imaging data has become important in the diagnoses and treatment of a variety of medical conditions include those related to conditions associated with the digestive system, conditions related to the cardiocirculatory system, injuries to the nervous system, cancer, and the like. Current sensing and therapeutic devices suffer from various disadvantages due to a lack of sophistication related to the sensing, imaging, and therapeutic functions. One of these disadvantages is that such devices are unable to achieve direct or conformal contact with the part of the body being measured or treated. The inability to achieve direct or conformal contact of such devices is partially attributable to the rigid nature of the devices and accompanying circuitry. This rigidity prevents devices from coming into confirming and/or direct contact with human tissue, which as readily apparent may change shape and size, and may be soft, pliable, curved, and/or irregularly shaped. Such rigidity thus compromises accuracy of measurements and effectiveness of treatment. Thus, devices, systems and methods, which employ flexible and/or stretchable systems would be desirable.
Examples of areas that are amenable to such flexible and/or stretchable approaches include, endoscopy, vascular examination and treatment, neurological treatment and examination, and tissue screening.
As an example, endoscopic imaging of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is essential for effective diagnosis and treatment of a variety of GI disorders, including inflammations, ulcers, abscesses, and cancer detection. By way of elaboration, endoscopic imaging capsules may offer certain advantages over traditional endoscopes for a variety reasons: they involve minimal patient discomfort and can image regions along the GI tract that are inaccessible with traditional endoscopes. All components are encapsulated within an ellipsoid body whose volume must be small enough to be swallowed and ingested. Consequently, there is an added benefit to minimizing the volume of these ingestible capsules. There also are a variety of features, including power storage and imaging quality that can be significantly improved if the spatial layout of the components within the capsule could be optimized. Additionally, optical imagers in current endoscopic capsules generally have a planar geometry, with the imager aligned with the optical center of the lens. This geometry is subject to intrinsic limitations such as aberrations, peripheral distortion and illumination inhomogeneity. Stretchable and/or flexible circuitry could mitigate some of the disadvantages described above with respect to capsule endoscopy, as well as traditional endoscopic devices.
Spinal cord and other complex brain or nerve injury is a major cause of disability, death and suffering, and to date there are few effective treatments. As an example, the complexity of the spinal cord, consisting of thousands of nerve fibers and both dark and gray matter, makes surgical repair extremely difficult, with a high degree of additional irreversible injury. Therefore, much attention has been focused on reducing scarring and stimulating regeneration with pharmaceuticals or stem cells. Bionic solutions have also gained some interest. Experiments have been conducted on electrical sensing and stimulation of ascending and descending bundles, demonstrating that electrical impulses can be used to provide some level of function. Separately, there are devices in clinical use which perform electrical stimulation of nerves in and near the spine to treat chronic pain, but these are not intended to restore nerve function. Combining the benefits of these existing devices may not go far enough toward dramatically improving spinal cord therapies due to some of the limitation mentioned above. Accordingly, there is a need for dynamically configurable and conformable devices, systems, and methods that minimize the risk of further injury while providing increased function to the damaged nerves.
Another example where the benefits of flexible/and or stretchable devices are needed involves tissue screening. While tissue screening procedures are of paramount important for early detection, evaluation, and subsequent treatment of cancer, clinical diagnostic methods, such as mammography and ultrasound imaging are expensive and require trained personnel. Thus, almost two-thirds of cancers are initially detected by palpatory (i.e. tactile sense of touch) self-examination. Palpatory examination is a qualitative technique taught to women, for example, as a preclinical test for breast cancer to be conducted at the home. It is well known that cancerous tissue undergoes significant changes in mechanical properties with respect to healthy tissue. Local lesions in breast cancer tissue are stiffer by up to 2-fold. Although self-examinations of breast tissue have facilitated early detection of hardened legions, indicative of tumor growth, the qualitative nature of these tests makes it difficult to ascertain any quantitative data important to clinicians or to analyze trends over time. Because the self-examination approach generally involves manually detecting the location, size, shape, and density of lesions by conforming fingertips around the lesion, a device capable of achieving conformal contact with the tissue of interest that can quantify and record the intrinsic mechanical properties of tissue can have a significant impact on the way breast cancer screening is currently performed at the home and in the clinical setting as a supplement to mammography and ultrasound.
Finally, detection and treatment of conditions in the cardiovascular system would greatly benefit from approaches that increase the quality of data generated by sensing devices, techniques, and methods. Currently, such sensing techniques devices and methods are greatly limited by their inability to achieve close, direct, and or conformal contact with the area of interest. Therefore, gathering data relating to the electrical, chemical, and other physical activity or condition of the tissue is compromised.
Stretchable and/or flexible electronics can mitigate or resolve many of the shortcomings described above. Such techniques can be applied to the areas above, or to any area of physiological sensing, medical detection, or medical diagnostics that would be improved by enhanced contact with sensing or therapeutic devices.